CETR is a privately held California corporation located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Campbell, California. It was founded by Dr. Norm V. Gitis at the end of 1993 to perform failure analysis, qualification, mechanical and tribology testing of various materials, coatings and their interfaces. Since that, CETR has been a phenomenal success and has grown from a small testing lab to a world-leading designer and manufacturer of materials and tribology test equipment with a highly-professional staff of several dozens of engineers and technicians.

CETR has developed a strong customer base all over the world, about a third of it in Americas (US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, etc.), a third in Asia (China, Japan, India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.) and a third in Europe (Germany, England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Russia, etc.).

The continuous success of CETR products is due to its unique leading-edge technologies, including the proprietary multi-sensing technology with high-sample-rate data-acquisition hardware and software, highest-accuracy force sensors and amplifiers, high-frequency acoustic emission sensors and amplifiers, etc. Its products can perform multitudes of operations to characterize nano, micro and macro mechanical and tribological properties under harsh environmental conditions (high and low temperatures and humidity, vacuum, gases, etc), and have become the unwritten standard for both multiple industries and basic research. They have been successfully utilized in numerous academic labs for fundamental materials research and some important breakthroughs in studies of thin films, as well as in numerous factories for quality control of ink-jet cartridges, razor blades, industrial oils and many other important products.